Outlaws with Badges

By Laurence J. Yadon and Robert Barr Smith

In the Old West, upright lawmen were scarce. Often, the men who were bound to keep the peace were just as corrupt as the men they pursued. These dishonest deputies chose their professions based on convenience rather than conviction, and the most revered were often the wiliest. These men held grudges, ruled with violence, and instilled fear in all who crossed their paths.

Offered here is an untainted perspective of these outlaws that discerns fact from myth. Legends such as Wyatt Earp and renegade lawman Dirty Dave Rudabaugh are presented as real men with quirks and weaknesses. The authors deconstruct not only the Dalton's last stand in Coffeyville, Kansas, and the gunfight at the OK Corral-among other famous heists-but also the triumphs and flaws of their organizers. The Old West's former outlaws turned good, former lawmen gone bad, and honorable citizens who moonlighted as robbers and rustlers are presented in these pages.

ABOUT THE AUTHORS Laurence J. Yadon is an attorney, mediator, and arbitrator who presents on various legal subjects, Oklahoma history, and crime history. He has assisted the Department of Justice in litigation matters before his local United States district court and has successfully argued before the United States Supreme Court. He is the co-author of Pelican's 100 Oklahoma Outlaws, Gangsters, and Lawmen: 1839-1939; 200 Texas Outlaws and Lawmen: 1835-1935; Ten Deadly Texans; Old West Swindlers; and Arizona Gunfighters. Yadon resides in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

Robert Barr Smith is a History Channel commentator and the author of more than thirty articles and five books on the American Old West. He has edited several titles, including Pelican's 100 Oklahoma Outlaws, Gangsters, and Lawmen: 1839-1939; 200 Texas Outlaws and Lawmen: 1835-1935; Ten Deadly Texans; and Arizona Gunfighters, and he co-authored Old West Swindlers, also published by Pelican. A retired colonel, Smith served more than twenty years in the Judge Advocate General's Corps and earned the Bronze Star and the Legion of Merit while serving in the United States Army. He is a former deputy attorney general of California and a retired professor of the University of Oklahoma College of Law. He lives in Norman, Oklahoma.

Dirty Dave Rudabaugh � Hoodoo Brown and Company � Henry Newtown Brown � John Larn � Bob and Grat Dalton � Wyatt Earp � King Fisher � Ben Thompson � Henry Plummer � Joseph Alfred Slade � Doc Middleton � Frank M. Canton

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Jan 29, 2013
• ISBN: 9781455616596

Laurence J. Yadon

Laurence J. Yadon is an attorney, mediator, and arbitrator. He has assisted the Department of Justice in litigation matters before his local United States district court and has successfully argued before the US Supreme Court. He is the co-author of Pelican's 100 Oklahoma Outlaws, Gangsters, and Lawmen: 1839-1939; 200 Texas Outlaws and Lawmen: 1835-1935; Ten Deadly Texans; Old West Swindlers; Arizona Gunfighter; and Outlaws with Badges. Yadon resides in Tulsa, Oklahoma.

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Preface

Our quartet—100 Oklahoma Outlaws, Lawmen, and Gangsters; 200 Texas Outlaws and Lawmen; Ten Deadly Texans; and Arizona Gunfighters coauthored by Dan Anderson—focused on the emergence of law and order in Oklahoma, Texas, eastern New Mexico, and Arizona. And Old West Swindlers examined fraud, graft, and corruption on the American frontier.

Outlaws with Badges was prompted by a single question posed in many ways during interviews, speeches, and book signings over the past six years. No, most Old West lawmen weren’t criminals, but these pages present some former outlaws turned good, former lawmen gone bad, and some of the lawmen who moonlighted as robbers and rustlers. And we couldn’t include all of them.

We have made every effort to provide the most accurate, historically accepted version of events, while providing credible, alternative versions or interpretations either in the text or footnotes. Names and places are spelled in accordance with common modern usage, with alternatives found in primary sources placed in parentheses or referenced in footnotes. Every effort has been made to reference the generally accepted dates of events described here, with alternatives referenced or footnoted as appropriate.

Robert Barr Smith (Tough Towns, Outlaw Tales of Oklahoma), who previously guided our efforts as a consulting editor, contributed the prologue and first eight chapters of this work. Judgments made concerning the relative credibility of competing sources, dates, and any errors sifting fact from mythology have been our own.

Prologue

Bad Guys with Badges: A Vast Amount of Trouble

Western outlaws were losers, by and large, as criminals are today. As a rule, they weren’t very bright either, which helps account for them even being outlaws. But they were tough, ruthless men, and they rode in a largely trackless, sparsely populated, rugged land that gave them plenty of shelter from the law.

The other side of the coin was the lawmen. They were just as hardy and usually somewhat smarter than the men—and the occasional woman—they pursued. The trouble was that the lawmen were generally ill paid—U.S. Deputy Marshals were paid by the arrest, for instance, and bore their own expenses.

If they had to kill an outlaw who tried to kill them—except on a dead or alive warrant—they even ended up paying for the burial of the bad man’s remains. Moreover, their lives were in danger every day. For instance, more than sixty lawmen were killed west of Arkansas riding for Judge Parker’s court in Fort Smith.

Long hours on horseback in all kinds of weather, constant danger, and miserable pay made the outlaw life sometimes seem an attractive alternative to law enforcement. Every outlaw, or would-be outlaw, dreamed of the Big Strike, financing a secure life of leisure in Bolivia, Mexico, or some place else far away. It is little wonder, then, that some peace officers turned their coats. On the other hand, the outlaw who survived often longed for respectability, the comparative normalcy of a real town, and a real bed to which he could go home.

It took a tough man to catch a tough man, and there was no advantage in requiring a background check for honesty. There was always a market for peace officers, and as long as they did the job nobody cared much about their past. In fact, a certain reputation, a rep, was often a handy attribute: the lawless were less likely to take a chance on tangling with a known fast gun.

Some of them managed to play both lawman and outlaw at once. Take Burt Alvord, who served as a deputy to tough John Slaughter, the man who cleaned up Cochise County in southern Arizona. Alvord was also a town constable and a train robber, sometimes simultaneously, until he decided being a bad man was a full-time job.

The same was true of Bill Stiles, who followed Alvord to the wild side and also served as a town constable, until both he and Alvord went bad as a full-time career. The wanted pair even ordered two coffins delivered in Tombstone for their funerals. However, the law wasn’t having any of the tales that both men had passed on, and the pursuit continued, eventually snapping up Alvord.

Stiles later changed his name and went back to being a lawman; ironically, he ate a bullet in 1908 while lawfully employed. About the same thing happened to Matt Burts, sometime deputy town constable and sometime train robber with Alvord and company. Burts spent some time in prison for robbery and then came in second in a gunfight in 1908 or 1925, depending on the source. Whatever the year, he was permanently dead—the usual fate of the western bad man.

All Wool and a Yard Wide

However, this was not the case for Christopher Columbus Perry—who called himself Charles—a formidable lawman, a quick and accurate shot, and a cool hand in a crisis. Unlike most of the lawmen who went bad, he was also smart enough to realize that there wasn’t much advantage in turning outlaw when the law would turn around and chase him.

Perry was city marshal of Roswell, New Mexico, and was famous for being a storied, phenomenal shot with his rifle—one head shot in darkness exterminated one of the criminal brothers Griffin at a measured 126 paces. That made it a clean sweep for the law, because Perry had already put an end to Griffin’s brother a little earlier that same night.

Perry’s reputation as an effective, fearless officer bloomed; he became county sheriff, then a deputy United States marshal, and the newspapers started comparing him to Pat Garrett. Perry was one of the officers who unsuccessfully worked on the mysterious disappearance and probable murder of prominent lawyer Albert Fountain and his eight-year-old son.

Perry was also the subject of the most astonishing claptrap ever written about the world of fast guns. It is well worth quoting:

[he] carries his revolver in front of his belt instead of behind, so that by a quick muscular movement of the stomach he can toss the pistol into his hand before his adversary has time to draw on him.1

Anyone who believes this is sure to love the Tooth Fairy and the Easter Bunny, as well; however, this tale does not detract from the real lethality of Perry the lawman.

There was also a dark side to Perry. Dee Harkey, a very tough hombre in his own right, commented that Perry was mean as hell and liked to kill fellers. Ultimately, Perry left law enforcement, not to stick up banks or stagecoaches, but to make money the easy way. He simply disappeared, and some $7,600 in county tax money disappeared with him. Also going with him was the inevitable mysterious woman who has never been identified. There is some reliable evidence that he showed up once in Capetown, South Africa. All that remained after that was rumor and surmise, including tales about his involvement in the Boer War. The mystery endures to this day.

A Matter of Business

Pussycat Nell was an enterprising businesswoman as the madam of a thriving brothel in Beer City, just across the Kansas line in No Man’s Land. This curious appellation was the nickname given to what is now the Oklahoma panhandle, for in those wild days it was literally lawless. Because of a surveyor’s error in laying out state borders, no state or territory owned it. But it had one great advantage for the enterprising business man or woman: Kansas was dry in those days and No Man’s Land wasn’t. Carrie Nation’s ax-wielding sorties at the head of her Anti-Saloon League had seriously crippled a man’s chance to get an honest drink up in Kansas, and the thirsty men of Kansas sought an oasis at which they could have an honest drink.

This spelled opportunity for Beer City. Nearby Liberal, Kansas, was a railhead town, with the usual host of cowboys eager for booze and female companionship.

Beer City did not have a school or a church, but there was plenty of the sort of entertainment a tough young cowhand craved. Business was so good that some of the soiled doves in southern Kansas commuted to work in Beer City in a hack that made a convenient daily trip.

But there was one fly in Nell’s ointment. His name was Lew Bush; he was the town marshal, who was apparently self-appointed. He called himself the law in Beer City, and, because he apparently was unpaid, he casually levied on all the businesses in town for his livelihood, which included not only his meals and his liquor but also his female entertainment.

Nell had her house on the second floor of the Yellowsnake Saloon, a convenient arrangement for cowboys putting away tarantula juice at the bar downstairs. All would have gone well had it not been for the intrusions of Bush. Nell was an astute businesswoman, and the time taken from her girls by Bush could have been rented to paying clients. Nell was not a retiring type and made her displeasure known. Apparently considerable friction followed, and Nell solved the Bush problem by poking her shotgun through a window of her establishment and giving Bush both barrels, of which he expired.

No punishment was ever handed out to Nell. Nobody much missed Bush, considering what he was. Furthermore, he was known to do some rustling on the side. The whole matter was a demonstration of the classic two-fold western attitude toward the sudden departure of well-known pains in the tuchus. First, he had it coming, and second, who cares?

Sanctimonious Assassin

Good riddance was surely the consensus about the passing of Jim Miller, better known as killin’ Jim or Deacon Jim. He played lawman for a while, but his chief business was assassination—he was a killer for hire. What made him especially contemptible was his custom of faithfully attending church between expeditions to kill people. That habit, plus his customary sober, black, broadcloth suits and immaculate white shirts led to his nickname of Deacon.

Miller started going wrong early. There is substantial evidence that at the tender age of eight he may have murdered his grandparents, and at seventeen he was convicted of the murder of his brother-in-law. He was lucky on appeal. The judgment was reversed, and he was never retried. But he learned nothing.

His associations were with the dregs of society: Mannen Clements, cousin to the deadly John Wesley Hardin; he even married Clements’ sister. He hired on as a deputy sheriff in Pecos, Texas—it was wonderful cover for his rustling sideline until he was caught stealing mules and promptly fired by Sheriff Bud Frazer

In the summer of 1892, Miller opposed Frazer in the next election for sheriff and lost, but it had no effect on his reputation. He ran for city marshal, won, and began to surround himself with hardcases much like himself. Finally, in May of 1893, the gang went too far in pushing the locals around, and Sheriff Frazer, who was away at the time, hurried back to town. He came with Texas Rangers, too, warned by a citizen that Miller intended to kill him when he stepped off the train. Miller lost his chance and his job.

The quarrel went on simmering, until Frazer had enough and ambushed Miller, putting three slugs into his enemy’s chest in a space no larger than a coffee cup. Miller should have been dead, but he wasn’t. The rumor developed that he wore a steel plate under his omnipresent black frock coat. In spite of Miller’s violence, theft, and the probability that one of his cronies had murdered the man who warned Frazer, many citizens of Pecos still supported Miller because of his sanctimonious behavior and a public conversion he staged.

Frazer lost the next election and left town. That should have been the end of the feud, but when Miller found out Frazer was visiting a nearby town, he stalked the ex-sheriff to a saloon where Frazer was playing cards and put both barrels of a shotgun into him. Miller was acquitted, partly it seems, because of his very public participation in his church.

At least by now, and probably earlier, Miller had begun his career as a killer for hire. He was even beginning to predict the death of his next target. For instance, he forecast the death of a man who testified against him, thus:

Joe Earp turned states evidence on me, and no man can do that and live. Watch the papers, boy and you’ll see where Joe Earp died.

He seems to have somehow gotten arsenic into the prosecutor’s food, too, although the initial diagnosis was peritonitis.

Miller moved on to Fort Worth, opened a rooming house with his wife and, of course, joined the church. Meanwhile he was offering to kill sheepmen at the bargain price of $150 a head. He expanded his line of work to include farmers—those troublesome fences—and even murdered a lawyer who had successfully represented several farms against big cattle interests.

He hired on to kill a U.S. deputy marshal at the behest of a couple of real dirtbags, the Pruitt boys. Again it was a shotgun in the night. Miller survived this one, too, although he spent some time in the calabozo prior to trial. Once that inconvenience passed, he hired on to kill really big game out in New Mexico: Pat Garrett, the lawman who had rid the world of Billy the Kid. This was a big payday: $1,500 for the job.

His next job was an even bigger prize: $2,000 to kill a rancher from Ada, Oklahoma, a man named Gus Bobbit, as the result of a long-standing feud with a couple of unscrupulous saloon owners. Miller held up his end, blowing Bobbitt into eternity with his favorite weapon. But this time he left enough of a trail for the law to follow.

The trail first led them to a nephew of Miller, a youngster named Williamson. He admitted that he had sheltered Miller before and after the killing and had loaned him a horse; but, Williamson said, he said he’d kill me if I talked—quite believable, knowing Miller. Williamson was duly arrested, along with a go-between, and his two employers were lured back out of Texas with a simple telegram, ostensibly sent by Miller: come to Ada at once. Need $10,000. Miller.

They came from their safe haven south of the Red River and ended up in jail also. But, before a trial could be held, the good citizens of Ada had already had enough of Miller. Jailed, he was putting on the dog in a most irritating way by having steak sent to him twice a day, having his cell floor carpeted, and regularly having the barber call on him, figuratively thumbing his nose at the citizenry. This did not sit well with them.

The finale came when the town learned that Miller had retained the great Moman Pruiett to defend him. Pruiett was a legend in the southwest. He had never had a client executed, and before Pruiett was through he would compile an astonishing record of 304 acquittals in 342 murder cases. This was the last straw; the citizens were almost certain that this mass murderer would go free again. The town of Ada wasn’t having any.

And so a large band of good citizens went down to the jail one night, overpowered the guards, and extracted Miller, his two employers, and the go-between who had seen to the payoff. All four were dragged to a nearby stable and strung up from the rafters with little ceremony and nothing much that passed for due process of law. Before he died, Miller actually boasted of his crimes: Let the record reflect, he is said to have bragged, That I’ve killed fifty-one men.

Officially, nobody ever learned who the hangmen were; nobody tried very hard. An Ada historian put it succinctly, and probably spoke for the whole town:

The forty-odd men who took in the lynching were honorable men, for the most, who had patiently endured desperado rule until it could no longer be tolerated. . . . [I]t can be written down as the one mob action in America entirely justified in the eyes of God and man.

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Miller and his three co-conspiritors hanging from a barn rafter in Ada

And if that pronouncement seems somewhat presumptuous when applied to God, it sure expressed the townspeople’s sentiments that Ada was a cleaner place.

Four Sixes to Beat

There was not much to like about John Selman, whose early life in Arkansas and various Texas towns, including notorious Fort Griffin, was relatively peaceful, as far as is known. Fort Griffin was a wild town, and there Selman made a couple of dubious friends: a prostitute, intriguingly named Hurricane Minnie Martin, and John Larn, a thoroughly rotten type who specialized in rustling.

Minnie became Selman’s lover, although he already had a wife and children. Larn gets a chapter of his own in this book, so suffice it to say here that as far as anybody could ever tell he had, as the judges sometimes say, no redeeming social value whatsoever.

Selman bought a saloon in wild Fort Griffin but made most of his living rustling with Larn. When Larn passed to his reward, Selman and his brother—called Tom Cat—moved to New Mexico and went into the holdup business. This lasted until the Army got tired of it, at which point the Selman boys took up rustling out in west Texas.

Meanwhile, Larn went into the butcher business—one can easily guess where and how he got the raw material. For the next few years Selman was in and out of Mexico, and in and out of shady operations. Then Selman abruptly turned to the side of the angels as constable of El Paso. He enjoyed no peaceful term in office. He killed Bass Outlaw—a deputy U.S. marshal who turned savage when full of booze, which was as often as not.

Then, in 1895, he eliminated the deadly John Wesley Hardin. Hardin was a famous badman, starting at the age of eleven when he very nearly stabbed another boy to death. He had been leaving a trail of corpses across the southwest ever since, killing at least twelve men, probably more.

Selman took no chances—Hollywood gets it all wrong when it comes to old West gunfights: there wasn’t any of this walking stiff-legged up to impossibly close range, saying something stupid like this town ain’t big enough for both of us, and then blazing away from the hip. Wyatt Earp is said to have commented that it was not the first shot that counted, as much as the first aimed shot, something entirely different. Earp himself has been portrayed in umpteenth movies and television shows, perhaps none capturing his story as well as Tombstone, or as poorly as My Darling Clementine. Selman saved himself a good deal of danger and trouble, and simply shot Hardin in the back while he was rolling dice in the Acme Saloon. Hardin had rolled four sixes, almost surely a winner, when Selman ushered him out of this world.

Hardin’s departure was unlamented, and Selman was acquitted of murder, regardless of the fact that he had shot Hardin behind the ear and then pumped more rounds into him after he hit the floor. It doesn’t fit the Hollywood pattern, but the professional gunfighter was interested in only one thing as quickly and easily as possible—staying alive, and ensuring that the other guy didn’t. Selman won a measure of renown for ridding the world of Hardin, but he had little time left to enjoy it; less than a year after Hardin was shot, Selman was shot down by lawman George Scarborough.

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John Selman (Western History Collections, University of Oklahoma Libraries)

Never Bring a Cane to a Gunfight

Barney Riggs came by the vocation of gunman naturally. Two of his brothers stood trial for murder and were acquitted, and Riggs carried on, killing at least four men, maybe more. He settled, if one can call it that, in Cochise County, Arizona, and is rumored to have had a hand in killing two Mexican men and three women while returning from a horse-stealing expedition.

Riggs couldn’t stay out of trouble for long, and trouble came not only in the form of stolen horses, but also in the form of a woman—his wife Vennie who, it appeared, had been playing unseemly games with a man named Hudson in her husband’s absence. Riggs was apparently willing to forget that fact, but when Hudson bragged publicly about his conquest of Vennie, Hudson’s reward was three bullets out of the darkness and a trip out of this world.

The law began their search for the shooter, and Riggs wasn’t hard to find. The law simply watched Vennie and followed her when she rode out to bring supplies to her husband. Riggs’ trial had its high moment when the prosecution, in one of the flowery orations common in the courts of the day, equated him with a renegade Indian. Riggs’ response was typical of the man: yes, you son-of-a-bitch, and I’ll murder you!—not the sort of thing you should say in front of a judge and jury. Riggs went to prison with a life sentence in the hellhole of Yuma, the end of the world even for free and honest men.

He would, however, be out more quickly than that, for in less than a year a major convict rebellion convulsed the prison. Riggs immediately